At the beginning of December, I stepped out of the shed and saw that the dogs were missing. I knew Ford was gone again. I walked across the yard, up the porch steps, and opened the front door without knocking. The trailer was dim, lit by the colored lights of the Christmas tree in the living room. Carolina was sitting at the bar in her nightgown, peeling an orange. She had the same placid look on her face as when she sat on the step and I couldn’t resist going to her. I climbed onto the other bar stool as silently as I could. I wanted to be still with her, to think about nothing in particular. I focused on her long, thin fingers pulling off strips of orange skin. She separated the sections and brought them to her mouth one by one. We didn’t speak of Ford and the tree lights blinked and outside snow flurried and the morning was gray and silent. She looked down at her feet on the bar stool rung. For a minute we examined them together, ridged with small bluish veins.
“My toes are ugly,” Carolina said.
“I like them,” I told her.
She looked up at me and smiled. Then she slid her hand across the bar counter and slipped her fingers between mine. I looked down at our laced fingers. Hers felt just like I had imagined they would. “You might as well move in here with me,” she said. “It’s too cold for you to be out yonder. I’ve been having bad dreams about you freezing to death.” But I could see in her eyes that it wasn’t just me she was worried about.
She put a clean sheet on a mattress in the junk room at the end of the hall. It was so cluttered that I could barely squeeze through the door when it was time for bed. I liked the shed better, but I wanted to be closer to Carolina. I wanted to sleep under the same roof as her, where I could hear every cough, every creak of the bedsprings when she turned over in her room at the other end of the trailer. The next day I brought in kindling and kept a good fire going in the stove. Sometimes I saw Carolina shivering, teeth rattling, when the trailer was almost too hot for me to stand, but I knew she was just feeling the same cold that was freezing Ford. We tried for a while to play cards but her mind was too far away. When the wind howled she glanced toward the window with big eyes. “I can go look for him,” I told her. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s acres of woods. You’d never find him. Besides that, you know he doesn’t want to be found.”
On the fifth night that Ford was gone, I heard Carolina weeping and couldn’t help going to her, feeling my way to her room in the dark. I climbed into the bed she had shared with Ford and took the curled ball of her body into my arms. As much as I wanted her, I didn’t try to make anything happen. She was nothing like the girls I had been with on the floor of the cave. I couldn’t even remember their faces, but I knew every inch of Carolina’s. I held her until her sobs quieted and we both fell asleep. Then there was a scratching sound on the porch, dragging me out of a dream. I opened my eyes and sun was shining through the curtains. Carolina rose, too. We looked at each other bleary-eyed for an instant before scrambling out of bed. We ran to the front door and it was one of Ford’s favorite dogs, an ugly dachshund mix. There were two others whining and circling in the yard, looking from us to the wooded slope at the edge of the snow-dusted grass. Carolina wanted to go right then in her nightgown, but I made her stop to put on a coat.
The dogs moved fast and we hurried to keep up, a thin layer of white powder gritting under our shoes. We walked for what seemed a long time, over a hill into thicker woods, the dogs stopping once in a while to look back at us. Then suddenly they were running forward, tails wagging. I saw Ford lying on his face under the trees, with the rest of the dog pack huddled close around him. When they rose to greet us, there were melted spots in the snow where their bodies had been. Carolina made a strangled noise and ran to Ford, falling on her knees at his side. I followed and when I knelt down with them I could see that Ford’s hair was frozen to the ground, a stiff white ring around his head. I was sure that he was dead. The dogs barked as we turned him over. The sound of his hair tearing free sent shivers racing over me. Carolina cried out when she saw his face, taut and gray and covered with sores. Then his eyes opened. They were glazed but somehow still aware. I saw that his mouth was working. He was trying to speak. I leaned close, my ear almost touching his cracked lips. “What?” I asked. “What is it, Ford?” He said in a broken voice that was barely there, like the scrape of a pencil stroke on paper, “You will be a great man.” For a long second I couldn’t move, even though Carolina was begging, “Help me, Johnny, help me, we’ve got to get him down from here.”
Somehow we carried him between us, panting and struggling, out of the wooded hills. We took him inside the trailer and lowered him into bed. Carolina said, “Where’s the truck keys, I’ve got to get to a phone,” but Ford shook his head, even in his delirium. “Don’t you do it, honey,” he mumbled. “Don’t you get those doctors after me.” Maybe it was because he was so much older, or because in her heart she believed that he wasn’t human, but she didn’t call anyone. I told her that he needed an ambulance, that he might have frostbite, but she wouldn’t go against Ford’s wishes and I wouldn’t go against hers. As Carolina ran for blankets I stood over him and prayed for the first time in years.
Carolina sat in a straight chair at his side for the rest of the night. As worried about Ford as I was, I was surprised to find myself jealous of the attention she gave him. But there was something else on my mind, as I made coffee and soup and tried to feed them both. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ford had said when he opened his eyes. I knew that Ford only saw in the visions what he wanted to see, but some part of me wanted to prove him right. There was an old desk in the bedroom and a manual typewriter. I’d never used one before and it took me forever to pick out the right letters. The keys were loud and I worried that the noise would disturb Ford’s rest, but Carolina said it was okay. She thought it would be good for him to know that I was close by. Hunched over Ford’s desk, I began typing up the poems from my notebook.
In the night Ford seemed to grow even sicker. The dogs sat outside the bedroom window howling until the sound was too terrible to stand. We had to let them in, even though their stink was suffocating in the small room. Ford sweated under blankets and ice rain pattered against the windows and by morning he was struggling to breathe. Carolina placed her hands on his chest and throat and burning forehead, but couldn’t make him well. I told her that we should take him to the hospital, that he was too weak to fight us, but she refused to betray him, even if it meant risking his life. She began to look sick herself, ashen and glassy-eyed. For a week she stayed in her nightgown, the knobs of her spine and the points of her hipbones poking at the worn flannel. She wasn’t eating, and it was hard for me to watch. But it was even harder to see how much she loved Ford. Somehow without knowing when it happened, I had come to wish she loved me instead.
Then one morning, nearly a month after we’d found Ford sprawled on his face in the woods, Carolina woke up beside him and placed her hands on his chest. “He’s getting better,” she said. As if on cue, he propped himself up and asked for coffee. It was the first thing he had wanted. The dachshund mix curled at Ford’s feet lifted its head and thumped its tail. Ford asked for a few of his books and flipped through them as he sipped the coffee. He was too weak to sit up long, but I knew Carolina was right. He was getting better. The dogs knew it, too. They went to the door and scratched to be let out. Carolina opened it for them and we stood watching as they chased each other off across the yard.